Hubbell Medal 2004

Sacvan Bercovitch

Citation

The Jay B. Hubbell Award is given each year to a scholar who has
made an extraordinary contribution to the study of American literature
over the course of his or her career. The members of this year's
Hubbell Award Committee were Wai Chee Dimock, Gordon Hutner, Viet
Nguyen, Cheryl Wall, and Richard Millington (chair). On behalf of that
Committee and the American Literature Section of the Modern Language
Association, it is a pleasure and an honor to present the Jay B.
Hubbell Award for 2004 to Professor Sacvan Bercovitch.

Professor Bercovitch, born in Montreal, Quebec, received his B.A. at
Sir George Williams College and his Ph.D. at Claremont Graduate School.
He taught at Brandeis, the University of California-San Diego, and, for
many years, at Columbia; he finished his teaching career at Harvard,
where he held the Powell M. Cabot Professorship in American Literature
and is now Professor emeritus . In conferring this award, we
follow the example of, among others, the Huntington Library, the John
Carter Brown Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, and
the Guggenheim Foundation, who have recognized his work with
fellowships.

Let me begin by recalling the names of the recent recipients of the
Hubbell Award--Paula Gunn Allen, Nina Baym, Paul Lauter, Annette
Kolodny, Houston Baker. To read these names is to recognize that it has
been an exhilarating time to be a member of the Hubbell Committee, for
it has been our privilege to recognize members of our profession who
have not only written powerful scholarly works but who have transformed
our sense of what we do and why we do it. It is, of course, such a
scholar that we honor this evening.

Sacvan Bercovitch's writing has transformed not one scholarly field
but two. His earlier books, The Puritan Origins of the American
Self and The American Jeremiad changed definitively
our understanding of the structures of expression and feeling that
composed the writing of Puritan New England, and proposed an
understanding of the origins of a distinctive American ideology that
powerfully competed with Perry Miller's foundational synthesis. Even as
he was identifying and exploring the expressive culture of Puritan New
England, his work was reaching forward, toward a description of a
distinctive American ideology. That ambition, brought to
fruition--excuse me if I fall into the prophetic mode--yielded his
great books of the nineties, The Office of the Scarlet Letter
and The Rites of Assent , which in effect complete the
writing of the history of American middle-class culture begun in the
earlier work--a history that persuasively and provocatively specifies
how, in America, acts of withering dissent are put to the service of a
vision of American consensus. In The Office of the Scarlet Letter ,
in particular, we encounter that rare thing, a text that remains
perhaps the most powerful instance of the intellectual approach it is
engaged in inventing. (As someone who has worked to preserve a fairly
traditional sense of Hawthorne's achievement, let me say that The
Office is that work of Americanist literary criticism that I'm
most afraid is true .... I believe this to be one of the higher forms
of scholarly praise.)

What is utterly remarkable about Professor Bercovitch's work--what
accounts for its originality and persuasiveness--is the perspective one
hears in that scholarly voice: mordant, acute, deeply learned, oddly
sympathetic. It is as if the Recording Angel had decided to do some
slumming as a scholar of American literature. But the best description
of the animating perspective that has given us this remarkable body of
work is his own. This is from the "Introduction" to The American
Jeremiad : " . . . What first attracted me to the study of the
jeremiad was my astonishment, as a Canadian immigrant, at learning
about the prophetic history of America. Not of North America, for the
prophecies stopped short at the Canadian and Mexican borders, but of a
country that, despite its arbitrary territorial limits, could read its
destiny in its landscape, and a population that, despite its
bewildering mixture of race and creed, could believe in something
called an American mission, and could invest that patent fiction with
all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual appeal of a religious
quest. I felt then like Sancho Panza in a land of Don Quixotes."

The scholarly achievement I have been describing would, in its
influence and exemplary force, be enough to explain the Committee's
choice. But like the other recent recipients of the Hubbell Award,
Professor Bercovitch has achieved his transformative effect on the
practice of American literary scholarship by concrete effort as well as
scholarly example. His work as an editor has been a particularly
important and consistent feature of his career. Ideology and
Classic American Literature , edited with Myra Jehlen, and Reconstructing
American Literary History were key texts in the shaping of the
historicist consensus that now governs American literary study, and, in
his work as General Editor of the Cambridge History of American
Literature, Professor Bercovitch has given us a magisterial collective
form to the new perspectives and understandings that have made this a
wonderful time to be an Americanist. Through his teaching at Columbia
and Harvard, Professor Bercovitch has reshaped our field in still
another way, directing the work of many students who have themselves
gone on to do important work in our field. And he has done
distinguished professional service as well, serving as President of the
American Studies Association.

In acknowledgment of all of these achievements and in profound
gratitude for the richness of his work and the example of his career,
we present the Jay B. Hubbell Award for 2004 to Sacvan Bercovitch.

Richard Millington
Chair, Hubbell Award Committee

Acceptance Speech

It is surely a landmark of some kind when a Division of the Modern
Languages Association honors someone named after Sacco and Vanzetti.
The credit here goes to my mother, a Russian Jewish immigrant to
Montreal, who had fought in the 1917 Revolution and did not give up her
ideals after she became disillusioned with Stalin. She left me her
left-wing legacy and an abiding sense of my Jewish identity but not
much else, and so, with no other prospects in view, I left high-school
for a socialist Israeli kibbutz. Six years later I returned to
Montreal, with a wife and children to support, and got work where I
could, which happened to be Steinberg's Supermarket. I take this
occasion to express my gratitude to Steinberg's Personnel Department,
which made me a junior executive and encouraged me to go to
night-school. And Sir George Williams College, now Concordia
University, then the adult extension of the YMCA, opened the vistas of
academia. I owe special thanks to an exhilarating teacher, Neil
Compton, through whom I recognized what a joy it is to read and discuss
literature, and what a privilege to be able to earn a living by it. My
thanks, next, to Claremont Graduate School, which gave me the freedom
to develop - which is to say, the patience and faith--that most larger
or elite universities (where type-casting is instantaneous) would not
have allowed. And to complete this initiation story, my thanks to
Quentin Anderson and Lewis Leary of Columbia University, who risked
hiring the raw outsider I then was.

What struck me most about the Columbia English faculty was its
receptive spirit. I refer to the fluid relations within hierarchical
structures--junior and senior, tenured and untenured--and to the sense
within those structures of a certain class solidarity. Lionel Trilling
lived above my means but not absolutely beyond them. He also taught as
many courses as I did, and sometimes the same kind of courses. Salaries
were notoriously low in comparison to those of "worldly" professionals
-- this was the era before the star-and-adjunct system--and it made for
a kind of adversarial democratic pride. Everyone complained about
income, and everyone felt superior to the capitalist market-place. I am
aware of the delusions and exclusions (including anti-Semitism)
embedded in that genteel sense of superiority. Nonetheless, it
encouraged genuine intellectual exchange that could be seen as an
alternative to the spheres of financial exchange. Things have changed
since then, at Columbia and elsewhere; it's now increasingly hard to
distinguish the ivory tower from the market-place. And again, I'm aware
of enormous benefits involved in this transformation: the opening of
academia to women and minorities; the enrichment of the canon in
response to those new constituencies; the expansion of the Old Boys
Network to a pluralistic maze of competing centers of influence. No
doubt Houston Baker and Annette Kolodny have a different story to tell
about that genteel adversarial spirit. But this is my story - not a
jeremiad, not a lament for some storied golden age, but a gesture of
thanks for the welcome I received into the community of scholars and
critics.

I taught at Columbia from 1964 to 1966; then for family reasons
moved to Boston, where I taught for two years at Brandeis, and from
there for a year to California and UCSD. Those were the years of
student protest, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Feminist
Revolution. What a fantastic time to be a college teacher! The study of
literature took on a moral immediacy undreamt of by Matthew Arnold.
Students debated the texts as though the future of society depended on
their interpretations. They showed me the capacity of American
literature to convey something of the excitement of what the Greek and
Roman classics must have brought to the Italian Renaissance. My
gratitude extends above all to the students at Columbia, where I
returned in 1970, and to those at Harvard after 1983. It was with them
that I put into practice what I'd learned about teaching. And from them
I learned, sometimes grudgingly, new ways of literary understanding.
They brought arcane theories to class, they insisted on including
strange, marginal texts. I found that learning could be a difficult
dialectic, requiring the capacity to sustain dissonance, rather than to
reach a synthesis. But I found, too, that it could be a sustaining
dissonance. The essays and books I wrote and edited during that period,
using terms like ritual and ideology, historicism
and dissensus, owe a great deal to a wonderful procession
of students. I can honestly say that through them I came to understand
what Plato meant by the connection between teaching and love.

What a privilege to feel part of such a community! A community of
students become colleagues, and of colleagues become friends, extending
globally from Boston to Beijng. I think of the many conferences I
attended abroad - East and West and Middle-East - each in its way a
source of personal and professional enrichment. Mainly, of course I
think of my local affiliations. I feel particularly grateful in this
regard because I have never been a proper institutional man.
Temperamentally, and often against my will, I have remained an
outsider--an uneasy, marginal participant in departments and on
committees. I consider it one of the highest attributes of our
profession that it has the generosity to accommodate marginals; and I
recall with gratitude the faculty interchange that recurrently enhanced
life and nourished the mind, as well as temporary communities that
formed for new intellectual ventures, like the band of Puritan
colonialists who gathered early in my career, in the belief that we
were breaking fresh grounds of inquiry, or the diverse group of
scholars, representing the diverse approaches current in the field, who
contracted together twenty years ago to rewrite American literary
history, and in effect to set the standards against which a new
dissensus will emerge.

So I end with a tribute to our profession. I refer now not only to
my sense of place in it, but to the work I did to earn my place. I
stand here as an example of what I consider to be the most compelling
and problematic aspect of the American myth: I have forged an immigrant
success story through a concerted adversarial critique of America. This
is not the time for a discourse on the paradox of resistance and
containment. I've wrestled with it for many years, and have yet to find
a resolution. But I can affirm that there's an alternative to mere
cooptation. I still believe, with Sacco and Vanzetti, that all
institutional powers corrupt, including those in academia, and that our
highest ethical imperative is to speak truth to power. And I believe
further, with the Hasid Reb Nachman of Bratzlav, that the surest way to
truth is to "flee from fame." And yet, from this podium, I can testify
that the institutions of American literary study have provided not just
a forum, but an incentive towards that radical dream. With that
extraordinary gift in mind, and deeply moved by the honor of this
occasion, I thank the Hubbell Award Committee.